CONNECT User Guide
Connect is a suite of tools to track and deliver channels to distributors, and enables end to end monitoring from content ingestion to linear playout. It connects with nearly all other tools in Studio to provide an overview of all channel statuses.
Dashboard
The Connect dashboard is a high level view of alerts for channels, and provides a means to diagnose and resolve them.
The top section includes a summary of alerts that at a glance can indicate what actions, if any, needs to be taken.
Alerts - A roll up of all critical and minor alerts currently active.
Playout Alerts - Issues with playout of linear channels. Critical alerts include a channel in technical difficulties, and a static image, a black image, or no audio playing out for more than a minute.
Scheduling Alerts -Upcoming or active schedule gaps for live channels. Critical alerts will be issued when a live channel's schedule has less than 1 day of programming left. Warnings are issued when there is less than 7 days scheduled.
Ingestion Alerts - Critical alerts will be issued when a feed is in an error state, and warnings are issued for ingestion errors on individual video items.
Playout Status - a detailed view of all critical, minor and informational playout alerts, sorted by criticality. Includes links to view the monitor tab of each channel.
Troubleshooting - Click through the alert to review the stream as it is currently playing out:
If playout is fine and the issue has passed, check for an emailed report from support@frequency.com for details, like how long a channel was impacted.
If audio is silent or stream is black, check the source asset in Manage to make sure it is not an asset issue. If so, check the source asset you delivered and reprocess in Prepare.
If playout is technical difficulties and content is scheduled, alert support@frequency.com for more details.
Scheduling Status - A detailed view of all critical, minor and informational schedule alerts, sorted by criticality. Includes a link to go directly to the schedule of each channel.
Troubleshooting - If there are upcoming schedule gaps, you will get notices up to a week in advance. Please click through the alert to go to the schedule and add programming as needed.
Streams - Recent additions and update to distribution streams, sorted by date. Shows the status changes made to each distribution stream.
Ingestion Alerts- A detailed view of all critical, minor and informational ingestion alerts, sorted by date.
Troubleshooting - Videos can fail to ingest for a variety of reasons. Once you've fixed the source of the error, go to Prepare and either restart the feed or the individual feed items that errored. Common errors include:
Unable to download source url, subtitle, or thumbnail - The path to one or all of these assets is either incorrect, missing.
Missing Description - Add a description to this entry in your CSV or MRSS feed.
No audio metadata introspected for this asset - Videos with no audio tracks are considered errors and most distributors do not allow extended periods of silence.
Image is blank - Thumbnail is a black square, this is not valid by many distributors. Please add a thumbnail that features a frame of the video or title treatment.
Extracting metadata failed - Invalid file format for the delivered asset, such as .m3u8.
Video request would result in upscaling - Enable upscaling in the feed settings to make sure the video is encoded in the correct resolution for playout.
Channels
The channels tab is a way to view, edit and schedule all channels in the account. By default it displays all channels that are "On Air" but the filter can be changed to include all statuses.
Mouse over a channel tile to reveal links to edit linear channel settings, and access the channel schedule.
Click on the list icon to view and edit channel details.
Click on the calendar icon to be taken to that channel's schedule.
Streams
Streams displays the current status of all deliveries to distributors, from planned to live. Clicking into a stream will show the details and timelines for each stage of the delivery process:
Plan - Preliminary stage for new distributor streams. Indicates the desire to have a channel ready to be delivered.
Configure - Includes the video feed distribution path that will be delivered , the EPG URL, the SSAI ad tags and CDN status.
Validate - Displays the status on if a stream passed or failed validation steps to ensure the stream is up to the standards and specifications of the distributor. Information on distributor specifications can be found here.
Submit - The date when a stream was submitted to a distributor.
Approve - The date the channel has been received and approved for QA by the distributor, and a target live date, if available.
Live - The date the channel is live on the distributors platform and data is available to view in Analyze.
View Distribution Matrix - Clicking "View Distribution Matrix" at the top right will display the status of each channel for each distributor.
Filtering Streams - Streams can be filtered by current lifecycle status, channel name, and distributor with the filters on the left hand side of the page. They can be sorted by recently updated, recently created, lifecycle stage, channel and distributor.
Monitor
The monitor pane allows for viewing real time playout of all channels simultaneously, as well as screenshots of the last several minutes of playout.
Each channel has a tile that will have a live image of the current playout that updates every 6 seconds. Clicking on a channel's icon will show its live playback in real time.
Clicking on the stream will also bring up the historical view that shows screenshots of playback for up to the last four days.
The left hand panel includes options to filter by status, error and channel names.
Bulk Playout Override - Select the "Override Playout" button in the top right to open a pane that allows you to select any number of your channels, and execute a bulk action to modify playout. The following actions are available:
Override to Rescue Slate - Switch the selected channel(s)'s playout to their rescue slates. Each channel would use its own rescue slate (also known as “technical difficulty channel creative”), which are managed in ACCOUNT/Linear Channel details.
Override to Live Stream - Switch the selected channel’s playout to a user-input live stream. HLS and RTMP Pull sources are supported.
Return to Scheduled Programming - Resumes the channel’s originally scheduled programming.
Distributors
Distributors provides a list of all active and available distributors Frequency can deliver to. Find more about distributors here.
